The lockdown does work, It certainly worked in New York and Europe. Illinois and Michigan have both suffered upsurges since they have opened up a little. Texas, Arizona, and especially Florida have rates that are soaring since they opened up and the response, except in Florida has been to lockdown too. Even a dimwitted fellow, as I have observed lately, as the the governor of Texas has realized that his state needs to lockdown. Almost everybody in the country has realized it except the flat Earther who lives in the swamp. It's like saying because his brand new truck does not travel at the speed of light that it does not work. I am giving up.
I watched Frost/Nixon Saturday night. I've seen it before, but I'm just finishing up my book on LBJ and Nixon is just showing up, and it was free on Netflix. That's the problem with Netflix you see stuff because it is free, not so much because you really want to.
The thing you are always wondering when you see one of those based on a true story movies is what is real and what did the moviemakers put in just to make it a better movie. Not that
I am complaining, making up stuff is the stuff of art, but still you wonder which is which.
Which is why you have wiki, and one scene I was suspicious of was when Nixon makes a late night drunken call to Frost. It didn't really happen. but the movie would have been worse without it.
In the call Nixon starts out talking about cheeseburgers but quickly segues into the idea that he came from an inauspicious background and has had to fight his way up all the way, while all around him the well born, especially the Kennedys, have coasted, and not only that they have looked down on Richard Nixon, and have plotted to keep him down.
And in the book, alone on his ranch, far from the halls of power, LBJ is grousing about the same thing, and especially about the Kennedys who really treated him like crap.
And I am remembering what I have been writing earlier, how LBJ was kind of a tragic hero of the Greek variety. He had something he believed in and he fought his way up from teacher's college to president so that he could implement it, and then somehow that ogre of Vietnam crept behind him. He could have just shined it on, but he thought some small measure would solve it, and when that didn't work he tried harder, and then his pride got into it and he tried to keep it a secret, and eventually it brought him down.
It's hard to say what Nixon believed. Early on he was a John Birch kind of guy but that was just to achieve an end. The general treated him shabbily and JFK put him down. He dusted himself off and slowly rebuilt his career, and in the shamble of LBJ's Vietnam debacle he became president.
LBJ was a domestic affairs guy. He didn't show much interest in foreign affairs, probably the reason he stumbled so badly in Vietnam. Nixon considered foreign affairs to be his forte. There was nothing he liked better than playing poker with the big guys. Which makes you wonder why he did so badly, taking almost four years to get to the terms he could have had stepping into office.
But I don't think most of the American people begrudged him that, they were just happy to be out of the war. And then the dems nominated McGovern, who at the time I was all balls to the wall for, but in retrospect I realize he didn't have a ghost of a chance. and everything was looking like roses for Tricky Dick.
But Tricky Dick didn't see roses. He saw an army of conspirators working against him. and fighting that phantom army he lost everything.
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